In schools, psycho-education is a classroom behavior management method that aims at training teachers and students about children's emotional and behavioral problems. Psycho-educational teachers believe that socio-emotional growth happens when children understand the role that emotions play in their school difficulties. Psycho-educational theory and methods include cognitive (thinking), affective (feelings), and behavior aspects.

Saturday, January 22, 2011

Social skills training has been used in school settings for students with emotional and/or behavioral problems, or EBD students, since the 1980’s (Zionts, 1996). The rationale behind teaching social skills to modify the chronically disruptive behaviors of EBD students is that, to profit from mainstream curriculum, these childrenneed more than just being placed in regular classroom settings with regular classroom peers. Because these students show severe deficits in the social skills they need to be able to interact in a positive and constructive way with teachers and peers, school staff needs to teach explicitly the social skills these children are lacking. Zionts cites research that supports the hypothesis that students who exhibit social skills deficits in the earlier years face both short-and long-term negative consequences that appear to be the precursors of more severe problems in adolescence and adulthood.

Definition of Social Skills

Generally speaking, social skills are those skills that children need to get along with others in social situations. Most specifically, social skills describe the classroom behavior that students need to show in order to become productive classroom members. Regardless of how we define social skills, the consensus is that social skills are behaviors that produce positive consequences for the user (Forman, 1993). Gresham and Elliot (in Forman, 1993) define social skills as behaviors that help a child attain important social outcomes such as peer group acceptance, positive judgments by significant others, academic competence, positive self-concept, and good psychological adjustment (p. 49). Other authors focus on both parties involved in an interpersonal relationship, defining social skills as “the ability to interact with others in a given social context in specific ways that are socially acceptable or valued and at the same time personally beneficial, mutually beneficial, or beneficial primarily to others” (Combs and Slaby in Forman, 1993, p. 49). Among the ideas generally agreed by the different authors in the field of social skills are:

Social skills are interactive skills

Social skills deficits are performance deficits that we can measure and target for intervention

Social skills training aims at remediating deficits in interpersonal functioning, that is, aims at helping children learn new behaviors, or strengthen weak behaviors

Social skills are primarily acquired through learning (i.e. observation, modeling, rehearsal, and feedback)

Strayhorn, Strain, and Walker (as seen on Zionts, 1996) put together the following list of social skills or skills that “promote harmonious relationships” (pp. 155-156):

Noticing positive examples of behavior in another person

Giving immediate enthusiastic approval or thanks for positive behaviors in another person

Providing real-life and fictional models of kind acts

Taking pleasure in trying to make the other person feel good

Noticing the verbal and nonverbal indicators of another person’s feelings

Listening empathically to the other person

Having conversations that are fun for both people

Playing well with another person

Modeling enthusiasm when participating in joint activities

Withholding unnecessary commands and directives

Giving clear directives when they are necessary

Making correct decisions about how much to expect and ask of another person

Giving fluent explanations of how to do tasks

Enforcing directives in a kind yet firm way

Ignoring trivial negative behaviors

Remaining calm and rational when the other does undesirable things

Deciding which negative behaviors to punish or reprimand

Using only humane punishment or reprimands

Not accepting invitations for a hostile argument with the other person

Listing options and choosing among them rationally when joint decisions are to be made

As we can see, some of the social skills listed by Strayhorn et al. look more appealing to teachers than to students with behavior deficits.For example, when we ask the students, ignoring negative behaviors from others and avoiding arguments are placed generally at the bottom of wanted social skills. Social skills’ training is conducted primarily in a group setting, following a similar procedure. First, the trainer introduces the skill. During this phase, the trainer defines, teaches and/or models the skill. Next, the students role-play the appropriate behavior, and the trainer gives feedback and reinforcement. Homework and generalization of skill to real-life situations follow. An individualized behavior contract between the teacher and each student participating may be developed to make sure that the child continues the new behavior after the training, and transfers the new behavior to other settings (Zionts, 1996). By experience, I can tell that generalization of skill is the most difficult aspect to accomplish, particularly because mainstream school settings are not well equipped to facilitate the transfer of skills to regular classrooms.

An Example of a Social Skills Training: Teaching Assertiveness

Forman (1993) defines assertive behavior as the midpoint of a continuum of behavioral styles ranging from passive behavior to aggressive behavior. The passive behavior style avoids confrontation and arguments at the expense of own well-being and happiness, that is, conceding defeat and giving victory to the other child. These children fail to express their feelings, thoughts, or needs to others, or they do it in such a timid way that they are easily disregarded by others. As Forman states, a passive child “violates his own rights” (p. 64). At the other extreme of the behavioral continuum is the aggressive style. These children almost invariably overreact to stress and troublesome events, attacking others, verbally and/or physically. In the school setting, we know these students as EBD children, and we can describe them as students that violate the rights of others. Placed in the middle of the continuum is the assertive behavioral style, which is a style of approaching social interactions respecting both own rights and the rights of others.

Bedell and Lennox (1997) describe an assertive request as the ability to state our feelings (how the other person’s behavior makes us feel) in a reasonable way, without being hostile to the other person, and without using coercion to settle the conflict. In an assertive request, the focus is always on our own needs, feelings, and rights. An assertive request gives an objective description (without judgment or name-calling) of the offending behavior together with a personal reaction to the behavior. For example, to make an assertive request, the child can say, “That is mine and I want it back (what I want or need). It makes me mad (my feelings) when you take it without asking me (my rights).” In other words, the child that is making an assertive request lets other children know when their behavior is bothering her without hurting their feelings, arguing, or provoking a fight. On some occasions, the assertive request will also include a request for a new behavior. To teach children make assertive requests, we can use the sentence stem, “When you _____ (specific behavior), I feel _____ (specific feeling), and I want _____ (specific goal)” (Bedell and Lennox, 1997).

Teaching assertiveness skills to sudents with chronic behavior problems is a popular coping skills intervention in special schools settings. Psycho-educational teachers and personnel intervene almost exclusively with acting-out and/or aggressive students. Although passive students rarely disrupt the classroom setting, these children benefit too from assertiveness training, this time, by a school's counselor. Both passive and aggressive students may show these behaviors coupled with low self-esteem and/or low self-confidence.

Older students with limited word
pronunciation, or limited reading decoding, lack knowledge in strategy using,
revealing little or no understanding that different words require different
word attack strategies. When they try to strategize, these children are
inflexible in the decoding strategy they use, on most occasions, using the same
reading decoding strategy for all kinds of words (e.g. a letter-sound strategy
or phonics). In addition, even when the student understands that there are
different decoding strategies, he or she lacks understanding of when to use a
particular strategy. To overcome a word-reading problem in an older student,
teachers and tutors need to teach explicitly strategy using or cue systems.
It is not enough to train the struggling reader in a letter-sound strategy,
because older students will find in their readings many longer words with weak
sound-symbol matching. Teachers and tutors need to prepare the student in word
identification strategies that include all
of the cue systems available to readers to be able to identify longer words
fast and to pronounce longer words fluently, that is, without hesitation. In
other words, an effective word reading remediation program must include
training in the entire cue systems that follow.

Follow this blog with bloglovin

Followers

Followers

Follow by Email

Subscribe to this Blog

Introducing "The Psycho-Educational Teacher"

Psycho-education is an enhanced behavior management approach based on the principle that, no matter how severe a behavior problem is, all children can grow socio-emotionally and can learn how to self-control behavior. Psycho-educational teachers believe that socio-emotional growth takes place when children understand the role that emotions play in their school difficulties. This therapeutic approach aims at helping children understand how their troubling feelings and emotions influence their behavior. A teacher trained in psycho-education applies skilled child guidance techniques to help children develop effective coping strategies, self-control of behavior, and social problem-solving skills. Psycho-educational principles and techniques include cognitive (thinking), affective (feelings), and behavioral aspects. This innovative blog is a must read for teachers, counselors, administrators, and parents with an interest in psycho-educational theory and methods to help children with recurrent behavior problems.

About Me

My teaching career includes more than twenty years of experience as a self-contained special education teacher, resource room teacher, and educational diagnostician. My classroom background, in New York City and my native Puerto Rico, includes ten years teaching emotionally disturbed/behaviorally disordered students and four years teaching children with a learning disability or mental retardation. I have a bachelor's degree in psychology (University of Puerto Rico), and a master's degree in special education with a specialization in emotional disorders (Long Island University, Brooklyn: NY). I also have extensive graduate training in psychology (30+ credits). I am the author of 50+ books and articles in psycho-education and in alternative teaching techniques to help students with low academic skills. My publications are available on my free blog, "The Psycho-Educational Teacher."